Because it’s a city made for anthologies.
When I hear or read the phrase “in a New York minute,” I imagine a 1930s Dorothy Parker standing in a 2000s Times Square. The early part of the 21st century, to be exact, when people still looked with their own eyes and not through their phones.
Standing at the intersection of Seventh Avenue, 42nd Street and Broadway, my imagined Parker—poet, novelist, modern woman—is dressed in a dark frock, a long string of pearls around her neck and a hat, frozen in her spot as people rush past her to any of the 41 theaters on Broadway. Or perhaps they are on their way to a steak dinner at the former speakeasy Gallagher, maybe to shop at Macy’s in Herald Square or Bloomingdale’s on Lexington.
“London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful,” Parker wrote in 1928. “Other places may give you a sweet and soothing sense of level; but in New York there is always the feeling of ‘Something’s going to happen.’ It isn’t peace. But, you know, you do get used to peace, and so quickly. And you never get used to New York.
You get used to peace, but you never get used to New York.
New York did shape a huge part of my reading life, whether through the writers or the subjects that lived in their books. Even as New York has changed tremendously, it remains a powerful setting and a source of inspiration for writers of all genres and eras—and for readers too.
Perhaps because despite the thousands of unproduced plays and movie scripts and unfinished novels lying around in shoebox apartments; despite the failed auditions—there is always a success story that tells a million others, “Well, that’s how you get to Carnegie Hall.”
Their stories snake past Bethesda Fountain to Dakota Apartments, down to the Theater District, Greenwich Village, Tribeca, SoHo, and the Financial District where one morning in September 23 years ago, things became “extremely loud and incredibly close.” Like a flock of birds flying close to a little boy’s window waiting for his father to come home.
The Algonquin Round Table
Parker was born in New Jersey and raised in New York City. She lived there for most her life with her last apartment located at East 74th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. It was and still is a neighborhood of mansions, apartment buildings and “carriage houses” where the wealthiest of the early 20th century lived.
She was part of a group of New York writers known for their wit. Called “The Algonquin Round Table” because they met every day for lunch at the eponymous hotel in Midtown, the name they gave themselves was perhaps more accurate: “The Vicious Circle.”
You’d think that with that kind of name they would be old curmudgeons who threw a fit when the deli below their apartment ran out of pastrami—but they weren’t. They were young writers in that period between 1919 and 1929. Parker was only 26 when the group was formed while The New Yorker and Vanity Fair writer and actor Robert Benchley was 30, both being among the younger members of the group.
Benchley wrote almost 300 pieces for The New Yorker. Like Parker, he was known for his sparkling wit and humor, gaining him fame, which he made fun of. “It took me 15 years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous,” he wrote.
While New York City never slept, the suburbs were wide awake and slowly sinking into madness. At least in the fiction of John Cheever on Long Island and Jay McInerny in Manhattan—worlds and genres apart but writing of the same misery and hope.
And so this is my idea of New York in fiction and real life, a city stuck in my period of prolific reading. The New York of dreams (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), grudges (Truman Capote’s exile from New York society), coming of age (JD Salinger’s troubled Holden Caulfield), love (An Affair to Remember) friendship (When Harry Met Sally), loss (the murder of John Lennon outside his apartment building).
These and every brilliant thing that true-blue New Yorker Woody Allen wrote and directed before he was exposed as a pedophile—and then he had to find his muse in Paris.
A fair swap
While New York City never slept, the suburbs were wide awake and slowly sinking into madness. This was the feeling I got reading two particular books in the mid-1990s as a young journalist. In my mind, they are intricately connected even though they are far apart in genre, period and authors.
The first was John Cheever, who lived in Westchester country on Long Island; the second was Jay McInerny, who lived in the Bowery district of Manhattan during the hedonistic, cocaine-addled, Wall Street-worship period of the 1980s.
The connection between these two books was my first editor, the literary great Greg Brillantes, a true master of the short story. I’ve written about this before—how we would walk from our office on Pasong Tamo to Makati Cinema Square where we’d raid the second-hand-book stores during office hours.
I was a very wide reader before I worked for him but the man just blew the door open like he was escaping the bulls of Pamplona. He took it upon himself to pile me with books every week. He loved that I was into whodunits, including works by noir writers of the pulp fiction era, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He also approved of my taste in science fiction because he loved Ray Bradbury too.
He knew Hammett and Chandler but didn’t read them and I derived a secret pleasure from it. One day he brought a thick, red paperback to the office and gave it to me. The book was The Stories of John Cheever.
In a word, the anthology is a masterpiece. In many more words, I had never read anything like it before. At times it left me unable to breathe—not breathless in a falling-in-love kind of way, but in a help-me-I-can’t-fucking-breathe from the quiet terror of reading about a man losing his mind in the short story “The Swimmer.”
It filled me with chills, how someone could both live an ordinary, happy-on-the-surface life and go mad from the monotony of it all. Maybe this was at the back of my mind when, after moving to the south of Manila when I got older, I hated it for five years before I slowly fell in love with it.
Back then, when I loved an author I read everything they wrote. Cheever’s Falconer followed though it was published a year before Stories, his debut novel The Wapshot Chronicles (published 20 years prior), and a few more including his daughter’s memoir Home Before Dark.
If the noir period had detectives like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade whose motivation was to right injustices, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was to solve the puzzles of 1890s England, Stout’s Nero Wolfe was driven by gourmet meals and 10,000 orchids—and the money it took to maintain his Manhattan brownstone.
Then I introduced Greg to Jay McInerny’s stunning debut novel Bright Lights, Big City. He had never heard it and when I said that it was to the East Coast what Bret Easton Ellis’ equally impressive debut Less Than Zero was to the West Coast, he said, “Who??” (Ellis would later write American Psycho).
I don’t remember if Greg actually read Bright Lights, Big City. I haven’t reread the book in over 20 years, but I remember vividly how it made me feel, as if I had finished it over the weekend.
There were many discussions about JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield who, to this day, didn’t really make much of an impression on me. Maybe because I was neither a boy coming of age nor insecure, so it wasn’t likely that I was going to shoot a celebrity or a US president with Catcher in the Rye in my back pocket. We argued about whether Truman Capote was a better novelist than a journalist (In Cold Blood) or if writers found California more inspiring than New York.
Had John Updike heard our last discussion, he would have raised an eyebrow and said, with just a hint of chutzpah but enough to make us shrivel, “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
The brownstones of Hudson Yards
If many people’s idea of New York comes from TV shows like Sex and the City and Gossip Girl or even its underbelly through Law and Order: SVU, mine obviously came from books.
Long before I would visit New York regularly when my sister lived there, I discovered the brownstones of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards through Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin. Set between the 1930s and 1970s, Stout wrote 33 novels and 41 novellas and short stories—and a character unlike any other fictional detective.
If the noir period had detectives like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade whose motivation was to right injustices, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was to solve the puzzles of 1890s England, Stout’s Nero Wolfe was driven by gourmet meals and 10,000 orchids—and the money it took to maintain his Manhattan brownstone.
The fictional Wolfe lived at a time when detectives were called “gumshoes” but he never once worked the streets to gather information. He lived in a luxurious brownstone townhouse located at 454 West 35th St. and rarely left it, preferring to conduct his detective work in his study, and relying on our narrator, the sharp and witty Archie Goodwin, to handle the legwork.
That Wolfe’s New York address is not as famous as Holmes’ London apartment at 221B Baker St. is a crime in itself. Wolfe had the entire townhouse to himself, Archie and his chef Fritz. The brownstone consisted of a basement with living quarters, three floors, a rooftop with three temperature-controlled greenhouses (did I mention he had 10,000 orchids?), and an elevator.
Had John Updike heard our last discussion, he would have raised an eyebrow and said, with just a hint of chutzpah but enough to make us shrivel, ‘The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.’
“It always riled him that anybody in the world didn’t know that he never left the house on business, and rarely for anything whatever,” Goodwin says.
Wolfe spoke eight languages and used only five (including the language he was born to, Montenegrin). He only worked when he needed to—and it annoyed him that he had to as much as he hated physical exertion.
In Stout’s first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, the detective tells a potential client waiting in his study: “Since I entered this room you have made nothing but mistakes. You were without courtesy, which was offensive. You made a statement contrary to fact, which was stupid. You confused conjecture with knowledge, which was disingenuous.”
His insults for a murderer are equally scathing. “You are the most ridiculous murderer I have ever met. I do not know you well enough to be able to say whether it was through vast stupidity or extraordinary insouciance; however that may be, you planned the most hazardous of all crimes as if you were devising a harmless parlor game.”
I loved Benedict Cumberbatch’s modern version of Sherlock (2010 to 2017), but it occurred to me that his insults tended to sound more like Wolfe’s rather than Conan Doyle’s Holmes.
I’ve long lost my whodunits (except for some noirs printed a hundred years after their first editions). I had stored them in my grandmother’s house to be pillaged by my younger cousins. But New York did shape a huge part of my reading life, whether through the writers or the subjects that lived in their books.
Even as New York has changed tremendously, it remains a powerful setting and a source of inspiration for writers of all genres and eras—and for readers too.
